I am currently the CEO of Sapient Consulting, part of Publicis.Sapient and a member of Publicis Groupe’s P12 “Executive Committee”. I am responsible for the overall leadership of Sapient Consulting, which offers deep industry expertise to steward clients through the evolution of their business models in an increasingly digitally enabled world. Prior to joining Sapient in 2007, I built and managed trading groups for large merchants traders globally including Louis Dreyfus, Essent Energy, and Weyerhaeuser. Named one of the top 25 consultants in the world, I’ve also spent ten years developing trading capabilities for investment banks including UBS and CIBC.

Decreased dependence on foreign oil due to the fracking boom in the United States has been enabling the Obama Administration’s increasingly isolationist posture on the world stage. Low gasoline and natural gas prices in particular have given the President political cover in pursuing a non-interventionist strategy in conflicts that would have, under different leadership, demanded America’s attention.

As conflict rages in Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Gaza and elsewhere, the President seems at a loss to gain control of events or even align allies, including Israel; when the U.S. does intervene it always seems to be too little, too late. For example, the U.S. air strikes ordered this weekend against the “Islamic State” terrorist group in northern Iraq have been criticized for their tardiness and lack of severity.

Somewhat surprisingly, Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even chimed in Sunday claiming the Obama Administration’s “failure” to intervene in Syria’s three-year-old civil war early created a power vacuum that led to rise of the Islamic State.

But despite the tensions in Ukraine, the Middle East and North Africa over the past year, oil prices have remained ominously calm. In fact, throughout 2013, North Sea Brent crude oil, the global benchmark for light sweet crude, traded in its narrowest price range since 2006 and showed the lowest daily price volatility in over 10 years, according to the Energy Information Agency.

And drivers in the U.S. aren’t feeling any pain at the pump either, even though demand is way up. Last week, the national average price for unleaded gasoline fell below $3.50 for the first time since March to around $3.48 a gallon, according to AAA. Meanwhile, U.S. oil consumption topped nearly 9.4 million barrels per day, the highest one-week figure since June 10, 2011.

The fracking boom in the U.S. is one of the primary reasons the oil markets have remained calm. The U.S. is now pumping 8.5 million barrels of oil a day, which is up 2.5 million barrels a day since 2008, when fracking became a major factor in domestic oil production. Those extra barrels far exceed the number that have been knocked offline due to the various conflagrations in Libya, Syria and Iraq in recent years. In fact, there is now a glut of oil being seen in the Atlantic basin, according to a report from the International Energy Agency released this week.

If fracking wasn’t in the picture, the U.S. could easily be facing oil prices northwards of $150 to $200 a barrel. Remember, it only took a worldwide supply gap of around two million barrels a day in the middle of the last decade to push oil prices up to $147 a barrel. Given that, it is easy to see how important the extra 2.5 million barrels from fracking has become to the worldwide oil supply.

But while fracking has clearly been good for the U.S. economy and world oil prices, it may have also inadvertently numbed Americans to the realities of international conflict. If oil had shot up to $150 a barrel and pushed gasoline prices to $6 or $7 a gallon this summer, chances are, public pressure would have forced the administration to intervene in the conflicts in Libya and Iraq before they got out of hand.

This is not an argument that the U.S. should be fighting wars over oil, of which both Bush Administrations were, in my view, wrongly accused. There were bigger geo-strategic issues at play, some of which are still playing out today. But, the political reality is that the American electorate isn’t typically swayed to action by pictures of conflicts in foreign lands. They are, however, acutely aware of how gasoline and power prices affect their disposable income.

The current energy surplus has made it so that the President doesn’t need to explain to Americans what is happening abroad, and how those threats could metastasize into broader regional conflicts that ultimately will affect the economy and cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives to contain, or how they may increase the threat of global terrorism. But both of these trends seem unavoidable from here without a considerable change in direction.

Without that change soon, we potentially could see events force oil and gas off the market, driving energy prices higher at home. Just a few millions barrels lost from Libya, Iraq, or Russia, for instance, could erase the buffer from the Shale Revolution and drive prices 25% to 50% higher. Add to that we will have fully developed regional conflicts to address and an alliance structure in disarray, and Americans may wake up and wish we had engaged sooner.

It is not clear what the administration’s definition of “stupid stuff” is exactly, but we all will soon enough find out if Obama and Kerry are steering the U.S., and the world in fact, toward a more dangerous and expensive future. In any event, letting an energy surplus mask geo-political realities must be the stupidest stuff of all.

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